Category: The Dish

The Washington Post homes in on the essential fiction that the president is telling about his position on military interrogation: that he wants "clarity" for interrogators. There already is clarity. What Bush wants is a vague and utterly subjective standard against treatment that merely "shocks the conscience." As we know, what shocks the conscience of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld is not what shocks the conscience of most of mankind. Common Article 3 is not vague. It is crystal clear. It bans what Mr Bush has illegally authorized and wants to continue practising. Money quote:

Common Article 3, which prohibits cruel treatment and humiliation, is an inflexible standard. The U.S. military, which lived with it comfortably for decades before the Bush administration, just reembraced it after a prolonged battle with the White House. The Army issued a thick manual this month that tells interrogators exactly what they can and cannot do in complying with the standard. The nation’s most respected military leaders have said that they need and want nothing more to accomplish the mission of detaining and interrogating enemy prisoners – and that harsher methods would be counterproductive.

Mr. Bush wants to replace these clear rules with a flexible and subjective standard – one that would legalize any method that does not "shock the conscience." What shocks the conscience? According to Mr. Bush’s Justice Department, the torture techniques described above – and at least in the past, waterboarding – do not, "in certain circumstances." So Mr. Bush’s real objection to Common Article 3 is not that it is vague. It is that it will not permit abusive practices that he isn’t willing publicly to discuss or defend.

These people do not even have the courage to demand that the United States withdraw from the Geneva Convention. They want to do so by stealth and by lying. This time, they must be stopped by the Congress. And in November, we must ensure we have a new Congress that will prevent the United States government from committing war-crimes in the future.

Check out "Jesus Camp," a place where children are taught to venerate the Great Leader, George W. Bush, to speak in tongues, and adhere to the rigid politics of Christianism.

It’s a classic:

It is often said — and was said by Ratzinger when he was an underling of the last Roman prelate — that Islam is not capable of a Reformation. We would not even have this word in our language if the Roman Catholic Church had been able to have its own way. Now its new reactionary leader has really "offended" the Muslim world, while simultaneously asking us to distrust the only reliable weapon — reason — that we possess in these dark times.

My take is, in chronological order, here, here, and here. The threats on Benedict’s life are obviously obscene and repulsive. But they are sadly what we have come to expect from some elements within the religion of peace. Of course, what Benedict has said about Muslims is positively benign compared to what he has said about homosexuals. But somehow, I don’t think we’ll get an apology. After all, we don’t threaten to kill people.

Retired Major General John Batiste Lets Rumsfeld have it on the Geneva Convention. It’s powerful, moving and essential.

Who wrote the following words:

President Bush exercised the powers of the imperial presidency to the utmost in the area in which those powers are already at their height — in our dealings with foreign nations. Unfortunately, the record of the administration has not been a happy one, in light of its costs to the Constitution and the American legal system. On a series of different international relations matters, such as war, international institutions, and treaties, President Bush has accelerated the disturbing trends in foreign policy that undermine notions of democratic accountability and respect for the rule of law.

That would be John Yoo, legal architect of president Bush’s assumption of monarchical powers in wartime, wiretapping without court warrants, breaking international law, authorizing torture and breaching the Geneva Convention. Except, of course, I’ve amended the quote. Where you read ‘Bush", substitute "Clinton." How quickly they change when they have access to power.

He was directly involved in increasing the intensity of one technique chronicled in Solzhenytsen’s "Gulag Archipalago." To recap the Soviet method:

"There is the method of simply compelling a prisoner to stand there. This can be arranged so that the accused stands only while being interrogated – because that, too, exhausts and breaks a person down. It can be set up in another way – so that the prisoner sits down during interrogation but is forced to stand up between interrogations. (A watch is set over him, and the guards see to it that he doesn’t lean against the wall, and if he goes to sleep and falls over he is given a kick and straightened up.) Sometimes even one day of standing is enough to deprive a person of all his strength and to force him to testify to anything at all."

Here’s what Rumsfeld wrote in response to news that inmates had been forced to stand for only four hours:

"I stand for 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to 4 hours?"

Remember that after Abu Ghraib came out, the Rumsfeld line was that he was shocked by what he had seen. In fact, he had not only authorized but monitored some of the torture techniques perfected at Gitmo, including "long time standing," and transferred, by his order, via General Miller, to Abu Ghraib. In other words, he lied before the Congress. In his defense, he offered to resign in shame. Bush refused to accept the resignation.

A fascinating reconstruction of a moment in the history of Greensboro, North Carolina, when one of the bigger "gay scares" of the 1950s resulted in 32 men being indicted and jailed. Money quote:

Unlike sweeps of subsequent decades, involving raids on public parks and gay bars, Greensboro’s 1957 trials focused on private acts behind closed doors.

The purpose, in the words of the police chief, was to "remove these individuals from society who would prey upon our youth," and to protect the town from what a presiding judge called "a menace."

Some 32 trials in the winter and spring of 1957 would end in guilty verdicts, 24 of them resulting in prison terms of five to 20 years, with some defendants assigned to highway chain gangs.

It’s a brutal story.

Not so much.

Bill Kristol urges the Republicans to campaign on torturing military detainees. It could indeed shore up parts of the base. The capitulation of neoconservatism to the evil it once fought against is now complete.

"You taught us no government worth its salt can subvert the rule of law. We believed you. That’s part of what you have as a gift for the world. Then how can you commit Guantanamo Bay? Take back your country," – Archbishop Desmond Tutu, on what the Bush administration has done to America’s reputation.